Hajra Waheed: Hum II

Hum II (2023) transforms Bogotá’s Fragmentos into a living archive of women-led resistance, activating the ruins and gardens with a 32-channel sonic installation that weaves together global struggles for liberation and justice. 

For a nine-month period, until February 13, 2026, artist Hajra Waheed is exhibiting her critically acclaimed, award-winning multi-channel sound installation Hum II in Bogotá, Colombia. Built around artist Doris Salcedo’s anti-monument—Fragmentos, Espacio de Arte y Memoria, the work inaugurates the site’s ruins and gardens for the first time. Over 1,600 meters of wiring have been carefully laid and concealed within the ruins and beneath the garden floors, allowing the work to unfold as a discreetly embedded, uniquely mixed 288-track outdoor sound environment.

Salcedo envisioned Fragmentos in 2017 as a space of reparation, remembrance, and artistic creation. To realize Hum II, Waheed, alongside the team at Fragmentos, led a meticulous restoration of the 17th century colonial ruins, the first of its kind in Colombian history. Over seven months, seismic structural engineer Francisco de Valdenebro stabilized the twelve earthen walls using non-invasive techniques that preserved their integrity and original appearance. At the same time, the gardens were fully revitalized: uprooted and replanted with indigenous flora and fauna. Muñeca Bogotana stone, a material native to Bogotá, now replaces the original ground cover and doubles as seating. 

Waheed remarks, “ruins are not static relics of the past but seeds that carry with them lessons. They remind us of what came before and challenge us to reimagine what must come next.” As the site is sonically activated, the ruins and gardens have already begun to bloom in unexpected ways; moss and plants defiantly proliferate through the smallest cracks in the walls. Here, a decolonizing approach to architecture takes root through a generative and relational practice, one that dissolves boundaries between the built environment and natural world, inviting instead a continual transformation in dialogue.

Hum II reflects on the leadership of women as central to popular uprisings, mass social movements and anti-colonial struggles in the Americas, Africa and Asia. Composed of humming and other vocalizations with the mouth sealed shut, the 30-minute sound installation features seven songs and musical forms that forge connections between multiple liberation struggles, including: two tarweedeh—an encrypted style of Palestinian folk song developed by women to send coded messages to their men in prison; katajjaq—an Inuit form of throat singing almost entirely lost due to cultural genocide pursued by the Canadian government and Christian missionaries; Un Violador en Tu Camino (A Rapist in Your Path), a 2019 street action created by Chilean feminist art collective LASTESIS and performed in more than 400 locations in over 50 countries; and a bhim palana– lullabies composed, sung and passed down by Dalit women to their children to popularize teachings of Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, the leader of India’s anti-caste movement between the 1920’s-50’s. While many of these songs have been suppressed or banned, all of them are still sung widely today, preserved and passed down by women to new generations. 

For Waheed, humming serves as a sonic strategy of resistance, existing between two oscillating states: the freedom of expression and the right to silence. In a time when both are under constant siege, this form of utterance allows us to create a new lexicon that proliferates like weeds in city cracks and along the edges of our blind spots—against all odds.  As viewers explore the ruins and gardens surrounding Fragmentos, Hum II offers a space to gather, listen, and learn, not only about Colombia’s history as embedded in Salcedo’s anti-monument, but also about the interconnectedness of women-led resistance across global struggles for freedom and justice.

Hum II, by Hajra Waheed, is presented by the Ministry of Cultures, Arts, and Knowledges of Colombia; the National Museum of Colombia; and Fragmentos, Espacio de Arte y Memoria. 

About the artist
Hajra Waheed (b. 1980, Canada), lives and works between Montréal and Yogyakarta. Her multidisciplinary practice explores the ways in which power structures our lives, while addressing the trauma and alienation experienced by displaced people due to legacies of colonial and state violence. Characterized by a distinctive visual language and poetic approach, her work often uses the everyday to convey the profound and landscape as a vehicle for human struggle and a politics of resistance and resilience.

Recent exhibitions include: 36th São Paulo Biennial (2025); 15th Shanghai Biennial (2025), IMMA, Dublin (2024); Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi (2024); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2024); Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2023); 15th Sharjah Biennial (2023); CAM St. Louis, Missouri (2023); State of Concept, Athens (2023); PHI Foundation, Montreal (2021); Portikus, Frankfurt (2020); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2020); 2nd Lahore Biennale (2020); British Museum, London (2019); The Power Plant, Toronto (2019); 57th Venice Biennale (2017); 11th Gwangju Biennale (2016); BALTIC, Gateshead (2016); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2015); La Biennale de Montréal (2014); Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, New York (2012) and Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona (2012).